Hoping someone can help on this. MY friend just acquired one of these. It’s the version with brown beam superstructure, amber tank and grey metal base.
His tank is an excellent condition but he noticed that the brown superstructure has been glued. It seems that this part of the tower is made up of many of these brown interlocking ladder type pieces. Well, his pieces have been glued. A pretty good job and he’s thinking maybe Lionel glued it as part of the assembly process. I’m not so sure. The tower is in otherwise excellent shape so it’s pretty weird that someone would have taken it apart and glued it.
Does anyone have one of these and can confirm what there’s looks like?
Just for grins and giggles, pull the roof off, and see if the inner tank wall (for the 38 pumping tower) was cut off, or it the inner wall is still there. I have one that has the saw marks from the removal of this “extra” plastic. Call it a “transisition” piece, and somewhat rare.
Yeah, I noticed that he has the one with the wall ground down as well. I happened to email someone else and he mentioned that these are somewhat rare too. Seems Lionel was cutting out this not needed wall and reusing the plastic excess.
According to the Greenberg’'s accessory guide, this was only done for a short period of time. Apparently the labor involved didn’t offset the cost savings, vs. re tooling the die for the tank.